— CHAPTER EIGHT —
between ghosts
[ 5185 words ]
"You ever played blackjack?" Noah asks.
They picked up Noah at the Hospital. He's like a strange fusion of Glenn and Tara: amusing and unsinkable and initially even tolerable, but he's become insufferable since Glenn found him those playing cards yesterday. He's insufferable for any number of reasons — his hope, his easy smile, how much he looks like Wes when he turns his head just right — but for now Sylvie settles on his cards. They're tucked between his thumbs and forefingers, fanning apart at the top, where his hold can't reach. And his smile peeks out above this curve.
"Is this some shitty Western, now?" asks Tara from beside him.
The upside to this road trip is that she isn't sandwiched between two people. Noah is, with Tara on his right and Sylvie to the left of him, pressed close to the window. She tracks forest smudging by, Georgia a smear of colour, and it feels like she never went anywhere at all. If she closes her eyes, she could be back in that bus, back in that firetruck, and if she squeezes them until her eyelids ache, she could even be back in Yared's Ford, somewhere off the Atlanta highway, the sun low and warm and spilling through the half-open back window.
She opens her eyes, keeps them open until they ache. Then at last she blinks.
Their bickering stops involving her after a while, and she likes it that way. She turns around, raises her head to watch the car drive behind them. She's not sandwiched in the seats, but between cars. They're not heading for Washington just yet, but a place called Richmond. Noah's home. He told her it's the place he lived after; that they took him in, good people, protected people. He told there are walls and gates, and houses and homes. He told her about lots of things that may have existed once, but probably don't exist anymore. When she told him this, his face fell like she had not said the truth, but something insulting, and Tara chewed her lip.
So they are going to a place that doesn't exist anymore. At least the journey is nice. She likes when the road gets thin, and the branches are knobbly and thin and scratch at the windows with a high wail. She doesn't like it when they have to stop and wait, like now, as they curve around a bent road, and the car begins to slow to a crawl. Abraham spins his index finger and everyone is getting out of the car, so she is too. They're all out on this curved bit of road now, not quite thin, but punched in close by forest. Behind her, Rick and those in his car storm up towards them. Carl is at his side, hat slung low on his head to drench his face in shadow. Sylvie looks away. Pointedly.
In front, Glenn and Maggie and Daryl and Carol and Gabriel have popped the hood of their Hyundai. Glenn squinting at its guts. Daryl leaned against it, arms crossed across his chest. Maggie wandering to the edge of the forest. She looks frail, thin, wispy, like she might just float away.
Everyone both convenes and scatters, some kind of wide-splayed congregation. Sylvie drifts towards Maggie, more habit than anything. Looking for an anchor, though there's nothing sturdy enough in her for that anymore. She stands beside Maggie and Maggie the corners of Maggie's lips lift slowly, wanly. It's supposed to be a smile.
The air is thinning as they crawl north, all the humidity crumbling and dissipating in the wind, which blows south in mild intervals. It feels fresh, as close to Maine's alpine breath as she could get this far south. Sylvie swallows it like it could be food. Maggie lets it sink its nails into her skin. Goosebumps prick on her dirty arms, but she seems unbothered, like her arms are not apart of her. Like she is not even here, present, feeling this. Sylvie too closes her eyes. Squeezes them. Somewhere, she is standing on the precipice of a cliff, looking down on Maine evergreens and slews of rock.
When she opens her eyes, there is a deer ten feet from her.
At the edge of the forest, it grazes the grass, one hoof on tarmac, the other squelched into soil. Torn between two worlds. Maggie looks at it, eyes red but still wet.
When Sylvie's grandmother had died, her father had seen her in everything. A fast-blooming chilli plant in the back corner of their garden. The sun at dawn, when it had bled a vengeful red. A sparrow who alighted in their front yard, hopped inquisitively towards him, and then proceeded to peck her mother's primroses until she flapped a towel at him to scatter. A hundred and one common problems and phenomena attributed to one restless spirit.
She knows that Maggie isn't seeing the deer, not really. Like it, she is torn between two worlds.
———
She had been lenient with herself on the way to the hospital. She had allowed herself to be curious. The singing girl, who nursed babies and protected her sister's honour. Strangely enough, she had even found herself wondering whether she would like her. And then that led to wondering whether Maggie would like her, after finding this singing girl. Was Sylvie just a void for Beth, a substitute to tide her over until she was reunited with the real thing? But this was a very selfish line of thinking, one which she suspended before it could get any deeper, and settled for counting the metal slats herringboned across the fire truck's floor. She counted to one-hundred and ten by the time they pulled up in front of the Hospital.
It looked as dead as any other building in this world, grime or damp or moss dragged down the off-white brick, the east side quarter-crumbled. Torn-open tents littered the courtyard: grimy tarp, cavitied canvas, all swarmed with bottleflies. There had been people out here once. Now there are just corpses, and whatever monsters lurked inside, the kind of monsters to snatch a teenage girl.
Sylvie pushed open the fire truck door in time with Abraham. When she pulled her hand back, Maggie grasped it tight.
———
They nestle their cars into a wreck, and they're beat up enough to blend in. She wonders if she could stay in the Ford, pass as a corpse; whether anyone passing by would even notice that she's not dead, only pretending. And then she wonders: would it really be an act? But then they're splitting off and she's left with a broken-down Maggie and a slew of other people she doesn't really care for.
Daryl is in charge. He leans against a pine trunk, crosses his foot over his ankle, then his arms over his chest. His vest clings to his broad shoulders, fabric taut against the swell of his muscles. The angel wings etched into the leather are so shredded they could pass as real feathers. He reminds her of a wild animal, but not the type he's been hunting for them over the past few weeks. Something bigger. Wilder. When he catches her staring at her, he holds her gaze and then looks away when she refuses to, not shyness, but like he's used to being a spectacle. That makes her look away. She knows how much attention can ache.
It's only noon, but it feels later than this. It feels like morning and evening and night, like some kind of pretend time. Like no time at all. Everything feels knocked out of place. It only hits her now, that maybe they will never to to Washington. And it is selfish, it is so selfish, but she wishes Noah's community is perished.
Everyone seems content to mill around until the others come back with whatever news. Maggie and Sasha are talking slowly inside of one of the cars. Their voices are quiet enough to sound like hums as they drift from the cracked-open car windows, and it sets a vibration in Sylvie's chest. Tara sits on a rusted car hood and sieves Noah's cards through her fingers, letting them collapse into her other palm. Beside her, but turned distant-eyed, Gabriel picks at his white collar, face twisted with conflict. Rosita twists a wild herb between her fingers, and Eugene watches intently, the both of them crouched at the base of a tree. Carol is at Daryl's side, pinching the straggled threads of his vest. And Carl prowls the peripheral trees with his gun in hand, looking like he's keeping them in rather than keeping threats out.
But she's not useless, not like them. She palms her machete, then the pistol Rosita had gifted her. "I'm going to scope out a place I saw some miles back," she says to Daryl, lowly enough for just he and Carol to hear, but her voice must catch on that periodic wind, because a few heads turn to her.
"Y'ain't going nowhere," Daryl grumbles, and looks away from her like that settles the matter.
"It's for the good of the group," she counters, and then registers that this feels too close to arguing. "I'm going."
Daryl makes a disparaging noise and for a moment she thinks he will dismiss her again. But then the sharpness blunts on his face and he replies, "I'm goin' with you."
Momentarily, Sylvie wallows in her surprise. But then Carol scoffs.
Carol is designed to draw blood. Eyes grey as a cutlass, hipbones arrowheads beneath tight camo pants, line of her lips straight as a knife. Even in injury she cuts a formidable figure. When she stares at Sylvie, she's skewered in place, "You're not going. Neither of you. Rick wants us to stay, so we'll stay."
"'Cause you do everything Rick says, right?" Daryl says, and something palpable passes between them. Something even Sylvie can feel. He sterns, then withers; she withers, sterns. Both of them, parallels. Daryl shrugs and pushes himself off the trunk. "If he's back before we are, tell him I wanted to check somethin'. Or tell him nothin'."
He slides his crossbow off the hood of one of the cars and slings it across his shoulders. Sylvie looks back to Carol, at the tight set of her lips, at the fury in this. Then at Daryl, who approaches Carl at the treeline, mumbling something to him.
"My dad told us to stay here," he grits out, raising his voice in response. If anyone had been in the dark about whatever transpired between her and Daryl, they're thrust into the light now. He scubs a hand over the top of his hat as though it were his hair.
She wants to tell him that his dad's authority isn't the same as his hat; he can't just try it on and hope it will work. She wants to tell him not to grit his words — it's just another reminder he's an insolent kid. And she wants to tell him none of that at all. A stupid, irritating part of her wants to tell him she's sorry.
"Your dad ain't here. I'm in charge. 'N I'm goin' with her, so don't worry, okay?"
"I'm not worried for her. She'll probably get you killed."
She had never even said it, but she retracts her sorry nonetheless.
Daryl crouches down to Carl's level. "Keep 'em safe, alright?"
———
The Parting Glass was the name of the song Maggie had sang, and Beth before her. When the door to the Hospital creaked open and the group began to trickle out, it was as if they were doing the parting, shifting out of the way for the glass: Beth's corpse in Daryl's arms.
Sylvie hadn't been under any illusions as to Maggie's invincibility, but that doesn't mean she wasn't thrown into shock when the rifle slipped from Maggie's hands and she went down with it. Her whole body melted to the floor. She hadn't cried — the noises she made were grating and animal, as if she were dying, drowning. Sylvie had never been inclined to such tenderness, but she felt that she had to hold her as she wept. Nothing could come close to the feeling of somebody rupturing against your chest, their bones and their muscles trembling apart sob by sob. Back at Terminus, Maggie had felt that. It was Sylvie's turn to do the same.
She hadn't kept her from slipping, though. If her eyes were anything to go by — glassy, hollow — and her perpetually stained cheeks, she was still on that edge. Toeing the line, kicking at the rocks on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the expanse below. Wondering, hoping. And Sylvie couldn't have pulled her back anyway: she's on that cliff too.
———
They use a map tacked to a bulletin board to determine the location of the library. Daryl, like her, is a good tracker, but his is more natural, not learned. Ingrained. As if he had to track to survive. His easy-coming focus leads them to the library.
It's different than when she'd seen it before. Probably because it's all still, the whole world. It's not tall, mostly stout — in line with the rest of the buildings on the street. It's walls are red brick, and spiders scuttle and web in the pale seams between each red brick. She reaches a hand out to touch the wooden beams slotted across the door and roves her eyes across the building. Every hole is curtained by wood: keeping outsiders away, keeping insiders safe. Or maybe keeping the outsiders safe from the insiders.
Daryl presses his ear to the door, brows furrowed, and pulls away after a few moments. "Led us to a walker party," he says. He slings his crossbow over his shoulder, shaking his head. "We ain't goin' in there."
"How many?" she asks.
He starts back down the street.
"How many?" she calls after him.
When he keeps walking, she unsheathes her machete and angles the sharp end under the nails. She twists and pulls it up. Sure enough, the nail pops out. He's at her side in an instant. "I said we ain't going in there."
"And I asked how many. I guess we're both ignorant," she flashes a smile that's anything but cordial and he runs his tongue over his lips.
Without saying a thing, he fishes out his flashlight and points it inside. As the beam skates the library, white light pools through gaps in the wooden slats. He presses his face closer, closer. A gnarled hand thrusts through a gap in the slats, grabbing for Daryl. He pulls back and its dirt-clogged nails miss his jaw by inches. She lifts the machete and chops the hand off the wrist in one clean motion. Brownish blood falls to the ground, and all that's left is the stub of a wrist trying to fit itself through the gap.
"'Bout ten," he says. "We get the boards off and I'll shoot 'em. You stay back, you hear?"
"I can do it."
"You can, but you ain't."
She yields, and they pry the boards off one by one, interrupted only by grabbing hands which they take turns slicing off depending on who's prying out a nail. When the board are all the way off, the two long, thin windows to the door are revealed. Though they're not windows so much as holes; the only glass left is in short mountains along the edges, the centre glass smashed and crunched to dust on the ground. Most of those ten skin eaters are crowding around the door handless, drawn by the disturbance to their habitat.
Daryl slings his crossbow off his shoulder, brings it up, aims at the first skin eater, but doesn't have time to shoot before she stabs it through the eye socket. It collapses to the ground. Daryl whirls on her, fury in his eyes. When he speaks, spittle flies from his lips. "I told you to stay back."
"I am back. It was a good distance for a shot, so I took it."
He's about to fly into rage again when a bloody stump wipes against the wings of his vest. He whirls around and shoots it between the eyes. They work together for the remainder of the skin eaters, shooting and slicing in focused harmony, and when they're done he sticks his hand through the window, jiggles the lock and nudges open the door.
Inside, dust motes rise to the ceiling, lit into existence by the sunlight now allowed to gush in. Daryl illuminates the parts of the library that aren't already swallowed by this sunlight, solidifying shadows into objects with the tilt of his hand. When they creep in further, it smells, strangely, of ash — the sour, charred remains of paper and wood — but there isn't a fire in sight, nor any remnants. It looks vaguely like the bookstore, she registers. Rows of shelves on wheels, columned into genres. Computers furred with dust, all in a line on a raised stretch of foundation on the east side. A desk sits in front of them, empty, some ghost of a welcome.
She approaches the desk. Evan Kim, reads the nameplate. She slides out the card with his name on it, leaving only the metal sleeve. She hands it to Daryl. "Possible weapon?"
He takes it from her and throws it somewhere. "Won't do shit."
She shrugs, going for the desk instead. She pulls out one drawer — paperwork, sealed files, packets of plain lined paper — and then the next — a packet of unused ballpoints, an well-worn copy of Twelfth Night.
Daryl is halfway across the room, pulling out books by their spines only half-heartedly, because he's using most of his focus to regard her suspiciously. "Why you lookin' in them drawers for?"
"Library desk drawers are supposed to have stuff in them. Food, drink, beer maybe."
"Beer? What libraries you been visitin', girl? Ain't no alchohol in a library."
"My brother worked part time in one. There were always bottles in there."
He eyes her warily, chewing on his lips like they might be prospective words. "That ain't normal."
"Your brother, he a bookish type?"
"Wes? I don't know. Probably not," she says. It's been a long time on the road. The days have sanded down her usual armour to nothing, so she lets her own confusion air in the space between them, too tired to guard her vulnerabilities.
"Why the library?"
"Nowhere else would have him, in our town," she says, and leaves it at that. She is tired, but there's a baseline of vigilance within her, once which not even exhaustion can breach. There will be no more Wes talk. She's tired enough as is.
"Nah, I don't care about that. I meant why now. You bet our lives on this place for a can of beans and a couple of beers you're too young to drink."
"We need it. Noah's people are dead, so—"
"Hey, you don't know that."
"Well if they aren't, they're probably not the same people he left. Not many good people are around anymore. Those people at the hospital—"
"Don't," he says, a warning. And for the first time, he chills her. There's a harshness to his voice, but it's not just that. An edge of hurt, right in the tense set of his cracked lips. She shuts up, though it pricks her pride, and slams shut the final drawer — empty packet of toffees, a single calligraphy pen.
———
They buried her at the church. Though they were tired, they dug her deep and sprinked her with rocks. When the sunlight hit, these rocks burned with a kaleidoscope of colours borrowed from the stained glass windows.
"She would've wanted it like this," Glenn had said. He'd torn half the sleeve off his shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He'd pushed the spade into the earth and leaned on it, forearms criss-crossed and dangling off the handle.
He didn't elaborate, but Sylvie knew. An expanse of trees, a field of wildflowers, a bed of rocks lit with colour, a church that was probably pretty once, bluejay's song.
This is the kind of place Wes would hate, she found herself thinking. Too pretty. Too quiet. He would think himself undeserving, and maybe it would be right. But then Maggie draped a necklace on a rock, and Judith cried like she knew exactly what was happening, and Carl — who held her to his chest even as she tried to squirm away, like she was looking to be held by somebody who wasn't there — hadn't the heart to soothe her, and this was Beth they were talking about, not Wes.
———
The shell of the nameplate landed at a door. Sylvie picks it up, slots it into her belt, and knows this is where the ash is wafting from. The door is untouched, a glossy varnished oak she recognises from school long ago — the fireproof type, tough, resistant. There's a single square window at the top of the door, glass cut in an argyle print. She could look in if a shred of paper hadn't been hastily tacked onto it. Scrawled in dripping black ink, so quick and messy that some letters were missing or merged by the ink blotting: put outhe fire, but de stilinside.
Sylvie squints, trying to form sounds and words from the letters, but they keep shifting around, shrinking. Daryl appears beside her, sudden as a wraith.
"You go in there, I ain't going after your ass again. I mean it."
"I won't," she says, turning away from the door now.
They survey the inside a little more until Daryl calls that he's checking out the storage room. Sylvie slips towards the burnt room and clicks open the door. A thicket of dust rolls out, dust and ash rolled into a thick mist. She coughs through the stink, waving her hands in front of her to clear the way and blinking the dust-induced tears from her eyes. She hears a low murmuring, and a scratching, and the room is so dark, penetrated by two tiny pinpricks of light in the slated ceiling like eyeholes. For a moment she stops, steps, looks up. She lets herself wonder who might be watching. She never believed in God. A hand clamps around her ankle, and somehow not a sound comes out.
She's felt something like it before. Been grabbed, mauled, almost. Sylvie breaks the dead one's wrist with the heel of her boot — a dry crunch and a soft thump, like a twig on soft earth.
But then there's another, staggering out from the darkness. Even in the dark he is horrifying, mottled grey skin patchy, thinned and burnt and pulled taut like string across what's left of his rotting muscle. Evan Kim, she thinks. Here to reclaim his nameplate. She scrambles back, casting a glance behind her for the door. The light is gone. Her back hits wood. It must've closed without her hearing. She realises all she's been focusing on is the blood in her ears (swishing, splashing, shooting) and the murmur that's become a growl, straggling towards her.
There's a burst of light, and the dead one is even worse-looking. Half of his skin is not skin, she sees it now — it is cotton melted to skin, the once-white of his button up stuck to burnt flesh. He's disgusting, and she can't bring herself to raise her machete. For a moment she is a girl who doesn't want to fight. And then that flesh explodes into wet chunks on her boots, on her cheek, and Carl is standing there with a too-big blade in his hands, as steely as his eyes.
"You're still trying to get yourself killed," he says, with disgust, like the thought of giving up never once occurred to him, like he couldn't make sense of not fighting all the time.
Sylvie looks up, away from Carl, above the tip of his stupid hat. She doesn't know how, or why, but she is smiling.
"What?" asks Carl, no longer defiant. There's an edge of insecurity to it. He pulls the brim of his hat down.
Above his head, untouched by blood or by dust, reads a sign: Ages 1-3.
She pushes past him. The shelves are modern-looking, and the books are dated, the kind of things she remembers still sitting in her room when she was older, though not having been touched since she was as young as Judith. The one with the catterpillar. The bears. Those strange creatures called gruffalo... gruffali? She choses the Catterpillar. She used to like his appetite, his surprised face. There might be something ironic in it; he'd never survive in this world, with a stomach that needs so much feeding. He'd never be like the rest of them, fighting on an empty belly.
"That's your reading level? Infant?"
If she were in a different mood, she might spit something back at him. She opens the book, and there he is: shocked, biting into a cottage cheese. And then it's snapped shut, Carl's hand over the front cover.
"Why won't you talk to me?" he says, because it's attention he wants. It always seems to come back to that, with Carl. "You just left me behind like I was nothing. I helped you, that first night. I told you about my mom, and you left me."
She left, she wants to correct. Not him. Not anyone. She left, no strings attached. But the strings had been tied around each of them that first day, when the first piece of the outside world she saw was his face, circled with sunlight. She thinks suddenly of her dream, of fire, of waking up and riding and ending up back at the church. The more she tries to make sense of it, the more everything seems to scuttle out of reach. She's been nursing her hurt with distance, telling herself she doesn't care what he thinks of her. It was a lie, it is a lie, and it will always be a lie. And caught in the teeth of his anger, she cant't bring herself to lie again.
She wants to tell the truth, this time. Only she's never been good at it.
"It's for Judith," she offers. She sits on the corner of the desk, caked as it is in dry blood. He folds his arms across his chest, eyes her warily, leaning against the bookcase. How strange it is for her not to feel indignation at his anger. To know it's justified. This must be what normal feels like, what it's like to not live on defensive mode. She thumbs the thin pages of the book, dents the brown skin of her thumb.
"That doesn't—"
"I don't have any answers. I don't have the answers to anything. I try to pretend like I know what I want but I just keep thinking about what other people expect of me."
For that brief minute of silence, Sylvie doesn't dare look up. She lets the words sit so long she's afraid they'll curdle and she'll have to throw them all away. Her heart thumps too fast and too loud. And then Carl breathes. It's like a sigh.
"Me too," he says. "Me too."
"I'm sorry," she says. It's not something she likes to say. Something she throws around wildly, carelessly.
His head raises, brows up, mouth open. "You... are?"
"I'm not saying it again."
If it were possible, he laughs. Sylvie can't believe it. It's warm, and a little high, but genuine. She doesn't laugh,
"The fuck?" comes a voice from the doorway. They find themselves assaulted with the white glare of a flashlight, battery weak and the glow watery. Daryl aims the beam in Carl's eyes. He squints. "You get in the back way?"
Carl nods. Sylvie looks behind him to where another door is barely outlined in with sunlight in the dark.
"I ain't about to babysit both your asses. Come on, git. We're done with this place."
They scuttle after him like dogs. Sylvie thinks she feels Carl's forearm press against hers as they slip through the door. His skin is warm.
———
Gabriel said a few words for Beth. The generic stuff, because he had never met her. It felt like a disservice, but the Greenes were Catholic. Maggie had lost other family. She must have been used to disservice.
Funerals are a kind of reverse baptism. Initiation into inexistence, no matter how much people dress them up as something beautiful. This was what her dad used to say, a belief born from her grandmother's funeral — a swift, half-baked affair, of which only a quarter of the family had attended. The other three-quarters simply moved on, accepting her inexistence, no goodbyes necessary. She doesn't even remember saying goodbye to her grandmother then, only knowing that she was gone and that she wasn't coming back, and that after a beginning there always comes an end. Always.
But while this was the end for Beth, it was no initiation. Judith latched her baby fist around a stone and dropped it on the pile. Carol regaled how Beth had saved her in the hospital, injecting her and hooking her up to machines and risking herself just to keep Carol breathing. There were tears, but there was no laughter, and there was an end.
———
They lose Tyreese, in the end. Sylvie's seen something like it before: flesh more cavity than skin, gaping and rotten and about to consume his whole life. Michonne had cut it off — which Sylvie never even realised could be a thing — but he's still bleeding through every linen and every ratty t-shirt they try to bandage him with. They stop somewhere off a main road to bury him beneath a willow tree. He had been sweet, and kind, and better than this world was asking him to be. And all he gets, Sylvie thinks bitterly, is a hole on the side of a road, some blip on their journey they'll never know to come back to. They drape his beanie on the cross, as if it means something. It'll blow away in the wind, Sylvie thinks. And this will be another grave upon a country full of graves.
"We're goin' to Washington," Rick tells them. His hands are still dirty with dirt and soil, from where he buried Tyreese — of all of them, he was the only one who could do it. "A hundred miles, and we'll stop just making it. We'll find a way to live."
But beside her, Maggie holds herself, trying to find warmth that's not there. Sasha is already crumpled on the floor, glassy-eyed. And Sylvie watches the ants lead a parade over Tyreese's grave like a celebration. She wonders what living would be like for them. If it would even be possible.
— AUTHOR'S NOTE —
firstly:
sylvie 🤝 being stubborn and pissing everyone off
carl 🤝 trying to save everyone w his saviour complex and pissing everyone off
secondly, i'm really sorry about how long this chapter has taken!!! for any uk readers, i just finished year 12 and it's been hell. but i never forgot about this fic!! i've just been swamped with work, especially in the past couple months with mock exams. i'm going into year 13 next month, which is going to be much more difficult and busy since i need to work super hard for the grades i need for uni. but again, not forgetting about this fic :)
also i wanted to tell this chapter in a more experimental form while also not dedicating a whole chapter to beth & tyreese's death. thus this was born! i hope it wasn't too confusing lmao.